


Come On Back to Paradise

by FrivolousSuits



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Drinking & Talking, Fix-It, Love Confessions, M/M, Panic Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 07:42:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13829607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrivolousSuits/pseuds/FrivolousSuits
Summary: Mike leaves New York to chase paradise– a full-time job helping disadvantaged clients in California, with his wife Rachel at his side.These are 5 conversations Mike and Harvey have over the phone, and 1 they hold entirely in person.





	Come On Back to Paradise

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 80th Marvey Fic Challenge, "Tender Is The Night."

_**One** _

The stab of pain in Harvey’s chest jolts him awake. The breathlessness follows, and the dizziness that pulls him back onto the mattress when he tries to reach for water, pulls him back down as if all his limbs have been fitted with weights, as if he’s just run a marathon, as if he’s a dying man collapsing into a corpse.

He lets his eyes flutter closed and waits.

When it passes he briskly rubs the tears off his cheeks, grabs the glass of water on his nightstand and takes a sip. When he replaces the glass, he clicks the home button his cellphone.

_12:47._

He rearranges his pillow and sags back against it and waits for the sleep that’s abandoned him.

He hits the button again. _1:52._

It’s an ungodly hour, and he’s too wired to rest and too tired to read or write. He’s got plenty of business calls he could make, if not for the fact that everyone in this goddamn city is fast asleep except him.

Then again, not everyone is in this city.

He pops the phone off its charging cord and hits the first entry at the top of his Favorites list.

“Harvey?”

“Mike.” All the tension in his shoulders dissolves. “Hope I didn’t wake you?”

“No,” comes Mike’s voice. “I’m still in the office.”

“Oh, so they _do_ work in California.”

Mike chuckles at that. “What about you, why are you up?”

“I don’t suppose you remember,” Harvey snorts, “but this is the city that never sleeps.”

“No, I remember, I just figured that death via sleep deprivation was a special torture you reserved for your associate,” he replies. “Oh god, you’re preening right now, aren’t you?”

“I am not.”

“I can see it. You’ve got the smirk and everything.”

“All right, maybe I am.”

The easy banter fades into silence. Mike breaks it by asking, “Why’d you call, Harvey?”

“No reason.” He pauses before adding, “I wanted to hear if you’re happy.”

“Yeah,” is Mike’s immediate answer. “Of course I am. I’m finally married, it’s my dream job–"

“It’s your fairy tale ending,” Harvey finishes.

“Yeah.”

“If I had given you a better job, would you still be here?” The question slips out before he can stop it.

Mike outright laughs. “You made me the best-paid junior partner in the city, how could it be better?”

“I could have made up a position for you. Pro bono counsel.” He smiles as he says it, like it’s a joke.

“Very funny,” Mike replies, and the grin in his voice warms Harvey through. “Hey, I have to actually finish this brief.”

There are a hundred apologies on Harvey’s tongue, but all he says is, “I’ll let you get back to work, then.”

This time sleep comes quickly.

 

_**Two** _

For days, Harvey debates whether to call again. There’s an addict’s urge that he shouldn’t indulge, not when Mike’s run halfway across the country to escape ~~him~~ his godawful managerial decisions. And yet every time he wakes up in the darkness, or even in the morning when his alarm rings, his first instinct is to call Mike, to hear Mike –

Mike calls when he’s coming back from his lunch break. He decides to extend it by an hour– what’s the point of being managing partner if he can’t clear his own schedule?– and take the call.

“Mike. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing in particular, I just needed a bit of intelligent conversation.”

“You can’t find that at the office?”

“I’ve made twenty-six references in the past two days, and nobody’s caught onto a single one. I’m at my wit’s end,” he protests.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

“Some men you can’t just reach,” Mike quips in reply.

Harvey’s grinning so wide his cheeks hurt, and he doesn’t give a damn.

 

_**Three** _

The third conversation never happens.

“Mike, you can hang up at any point.”

Harvey’s been banging his head against a metaphorical wall for days, and he’s not far from ramming it into a literal one if he can’t untangle this case.

“Imagine I have a hypothetical client who’s committed hypothetical fraud, specifically in the form of IP theft  . . .”

He’s breaking privilege, he’s breaking more rules than he can count, and if he ever gets found out then Mike will get dragged into the malpractice suit and put in the uncomfortable position of either sacrificing Harvey or committing perjury for him. Harvey wouldn’t blame him if he hung up five seconds in.

Mike stays on the line.

“– so I’ve been hounding opposing counsel all afternoon to get them to settle.”

“What if you don’t settle?”

“We have to settle. She stole patented info, they have the trail, any judge with eyes knows our side has no chance–”

“Unless you fight the underlying patent.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you should brush up on the technical details and then check out _Mayo v. Prometheus_.”

In a split second, Harvey performs the next three mental jumps and comprehends Mike’s full argument. It’s an extraordinary solution, one that knocks the air out of Harvey’s lungs for a second, and he’s intoxicated by the repartee they keep going as they rebuild his case out of thin air, step by step. Facts and insights and clever precedents all come spilling out of Mike’s mouth, as if he’s been bottling up his brilliance and just waiting for an excuse to overflow.

Their third conversation absolutely never happens, Harvey would swear to it in a court of law. He rides the high all week.

 

_**Four** _

Ever since the first time, their conversations have occurred during mutually agreeable business hours. Still, when Mike’s ringtone– “I Don’t Want to Lose You” by The Spinners, a song Harvey chose years ago just to annoy him– blares past three in the morning, he picks up before the first measure is done.

“Harvey.”

“Mike?”

“Harrrvey.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I see your ‘drunk’ and I raise you ‘unfair.’”

“I’m unfair?”

“Yeah, it’s unfair. You’re too smart, and you’re too pretty, and you’re fast. Not like that. Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?” He dwindles into incoherent mumbling.

“You think I’m pretty?” Harvey snorts.

“Yeah.” Mike breathes the word, too drunk for sarcasm or guile. Then he adds, “I miss you.”

Harvey freezes for a moment, unsure how he can possibly answer, but then Mike starts rambling again. “You’re my best friend. You and this bottle of– huh, wait, this is Jack. Where did Mr. Macallan go? He’s nicer, you know, and smooth. Like you.”

Harvey sits up, propping himself up on his elbows. “Why are you on such good terms with Jack, Mike?”

“Are you accusing me of, of cheating on Rachel with him?”

“Just asking a simple question.”

“Well, she doesn’t care. She just— you know what today’s fight was about? Backsplash tiles. She wanted aquamarine, and they delivered teal, and then she made the kid at the store cry, and I tried to just make her stop crying, and then I said aquamarine was fine, we haven’t bought the, the rugs or the towels yet, we can make everything work for teal, and now she shut the door on me. And now I am sitting outside in this so-called downtown.”

“Is it safe? Aren’t you cold?”

“Nah, they don’t have seasons here,” Mike sighs. “I miss snow, and hail. I miss slush. I miss black ice, can you believe it?”

“No.”

“And I miss the city that doesn’t sleep. Here, it’s just midnight and the nightlife is gone. Nightdeath.”

Harvey frowns. “If you’re all alone, I think you should go back inside.”

“Rachel doesn’t want me,” he says, sounding surprisingly forlorn until he adds, “And anyway I’m not alone.”

“So there’s people there?”

“There’s you.”

Harvey considers the likelihood of getting mugged in downtown Saratoga and decides to let it go, in favor of morbid curiosity. “Do you and Rachel fight a lot?”

Mike gives another weighty sigh. “Harvey, I think we used up the whole honeymoon period on our engagement.”

“But what’s causing it?”

“Everything. Nothing. You want the actual answer?”

“Yeah.”

“It was so much . . . easier when we worked together. ‘Cause we’d see each other, and if one of us got stressed from work then we both, we both got it, you know? Now she’s just tired all the time, and I get it, I do, her work’s really important and it’s all the way up north, and, and . . .”

“You have important work too, Mike.”

“Do I, though?”

“Well, you’re working exclusively with disadvantaged clients who could never afford your skills otherwise–”

“But I can’t use my skills, not really. Harvey, they don’t let me see clients for more than a couple hours. And I’m good, I can put together the arguments and do the paperwork and all that, but I can’t get to know the people, I can’t find all the evidence and the truth that quickly, I can’t even go to court myself because the damn New York license won’t transfer, I just– I can’t.” His voice breaks as he says, “I’m not as good a lawyer as I thought.”

“Hey,” Harvey cuts in sharply. “I was your boss for the better part of a decade, but maybe I held something back. I see some real genius in your lawyering, Mike.” He cuts off the quote there and switches tactics. “And if they’re not putting you in a position to see that too, that’s on them.”

“But Harvey, I have a need for speed, and they’re giving me _all_ the speed. I’ve got five new clients a day.”

“Kid, you're not going to be happy unless you're going Mach 2 with your hair on fire. And you can’t go Mach 2 with no fuel in the damn tank.”

His tone is tender, but as Mike stays silent he wonders if the words were too harsh.

“Before,” Mike finally says, so tired it sounds like a croak, “Rachel and I, we’d talk about work, and we’d talk about our future together. Now there’s no work for us to talk about, and we’re in the future, and it doesn’t work anymore.”

“Mike–”

“I miss you.”

 

_**Five** _

_I don't wanna lose you  
I love you as you are _

Hearing that his ringtone’s already reached the chorus, Harvey half-runs into his office and takes the call. Before he can speak, Mike says, “Harvey, I need you to look over a contract pro bono.”

“You do, do you?”

“You’ll like it.”

“Pro bono?” He shakes his head, even while grinning. “I don’t think so, my time runs well over a thousand an hour.”

“It’s my divorce settlement.”

Harvey freezes.

“Harvey?”

“Never mind, I’ll pay you over a thousand an hour if you let me look at it.”

Mike laughs. “You’ve got a promising record on divorce cases.”

Harvey raises his eyebrows. “So you want Robert Zane to throw me into a coffee table?”

“I was thinking more about what happened before the table.”

Oh.

“Mike–”

“I know I was drunk, but there was a quote that you didn’t finish, and I can’t help wondering if you wanted to.”

Oh god.

Mike knows.

He knows Mike knows.

Worse, he knows Mike knows he _knows_ the rest of the damn quote.

Harvey spins his chair around to look out at the New York skyline, steadying himself with one deep breath, then another. At last, he murmurs, “I see some real genius in your lawyering, Mike, but I couldn't say that in there.” Another deep breath. “I was afraid that everyone in the world would see right through me, and . . .” He closes his eyes and forces one last shaky inhale. “I just don't want anyone to know that I've fallen for you.”

Mike hangs up.

There’s the swell of breathless panic, until he hears the door open behind him. “Here’s the contract.”

He jumps to his feet and spins back around, and there’s Mike, standing in the doorway with the papers in his hand and that perfect, infuriating smirk on his face. Harvey can do nothing but gaze at him, brown eyes locked on blue, as a hundred messages flit between them in a split second, as both their smiles soften.

“You came to deliver it in person?” he says at last.

“Yeah,” Mike nods. “Also to ask about this Specter Litt ‘Pro Bono Counsel’ position I’ve heard of.”

“Turns out it just opened up.”

 

_**+1** _

Harvey wakes at eight on a Saturday morning. For a brief moment he tries to get up, only to be pulled back down by the weights attached to his body– Mike’s forehead tucked against his right elbow, and Mike’s right arm heavy across his torso.

“It’s too early,” Mike mumbles.

“You forget not everyone’s jet-lagged,” Harvey says, briefly attempting to disentangle himself.

“Uh-uh,” he whines. “Come back.”

Chuckling, Harvey nestles closer to Mike, closes his eyes and goes back to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes are from _Cool Hand Luke_ and _Top Gun_. The title is a quote from "Greenback Boogie," the _Suits_ theme song. 
> 
> I imagine Mike and Rachel will drift off into the western sunset and move to the so-called paradise of California; specifically, I imagine Rachel as a bigshot San Francisco lawyer. I picked Saratoga for their home because it was the [safest city around San Francisco](https://www.safewise.com/blog/safest-cities-california/%0A) with a name I thought was pretty, lol.


End file.
